> ordering the numbers based on the size of units makes things easier and more useful

How does it make it easier and more useful?

Big endian ordering reduces sorting by date to sorting by number. But not big endian parts in little endian order.

Apart from sorting advantages it makes the format less confusing, since it's just about remembering ascending/descending vs. three individual positions. If I see a DD-MM-YYYY date or YYYY-MM-DD I know which one it has to be. If I see MM-DD-YYYY I have to be told, or I will misunderstand as long as the date is ambiguous.

Thank you for this comment and many others in this thread. I feel I've been converted to the YYYY-MM-DD structure. Because it's in order of specificity. It feels like it saves time and potentially compute.

However, I think a big problem with this is the way people say dates colloquially. Such as, March 24th 2019. Or even the 24th of March, 2019.

I can't imagine saying to someone, oh can you come over to my party, it's 2024 September 5th.

In many ways digital is designed to be a facsimile of analog. So sometimes what "makes sense" to people hyper fixated on the topic are simply not amenable to real society.

So that's where DD-MM-YYYY comes in. In my language people always say dates in that order, and even when taking English I'll refer to "the 24th of March 2019". YYYY-MM-DD is, strangely enough, kind of just "a bunch of numbers" to me. If someone tells me a date in that format it'll take a second to realise it's a date. But for digital storage it's highly useful! I'm fine switching between the two formats based on the situation. The length of the year specifier makes this unambiguous.